rjmarvin writes: The cannabis industry made $5.4 billion in 2015. Legally. That's $5.4 billion worth of businesses growing and cultivating plants, processing and shipping products, and selling marijuana, cannabis oil, and all manner of edibles at dispensaries. That booming economy needs technology to function http://www.pcmag.com/article/3.... The figure is forecast to hit $22.8 billion by 2020 according to the latest State of Legal Marijuana Markets Report https://frontierfinancials.com..., and Flowhub is a seed-to-sale management and compliance platform offering hardware and software to manage business operations and state-by-state compliance at every step of the cannabis product pipeline in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and medical dispensaries nationwide.

rjmarvin writes: Mobile payments technology dominated Mobile World Congress this year, and not exactly in the ways you'd expect. MasterCard and Visa are granting payment capabilities to a wide range of devices and objects—from wearables and smart clothes to connected cars—turning the Internet of Things (IoT) into a tokenized payments network http://www.pcmag.com/article2/... while on the mobile apps and services side, companies like PayPal and Stripe are essentially building operating systems http://www.pcmag.com/article2/... on which developers and retailers can run contextual commerce experiences.

rjmarvin writes: When the crowdfunding process is over, startups relying on complex hardware manufacturing face all sorts of hurdles http://www.pcmag.com/article2/... crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Crowdfunder, GoFundMe, and RocketHub don't prepare you for. From under-projected funding estimates and negotiating with contract manufacturers to shipping complications and cash flow problems, successfully funded hardware startups can fail early and often.There are currently more than 500 technology projects live on Kickstarter,According to the platform's own Kickstarter Fulfillment Report https://www.kickstarter.com/fu... conducted by UPenn, 9 percent of Kickstarter projects failed to deliver their backers "rewards," meaning a campaign was completely funded but those who donated never received any of the promised perks or returns. In lieu of additional services on the crowdfunding platforms themselves to help startups post-funding, hardware businesses can take a few key steps to prepare for the complications ahead.

rjmarvin writes: New SEC regulations and the investor marketplaces they've spawned are finally filling the huge funding gap http://bit.ly/1NPNlrQ betweeen VC and angel investor funding and large-scale IPOs. The SEC's RegA+ regulations, which expands the JOBS Act for midsize businesses, lets investors fund companies using platforms like Manhattan Street Capital, which targets companies valued between $4-$150 million run like a crowdfunding platform. On the crowdfunding front, the SEC finally voted to approve Title III http://www.sec.gov/news/pressr..., the JOBS Act provision allowing not just VCs but everyday investors to buy into startups through crowdfunding platforms, a move that will take effect in late January 2016 and inject a massive influx of new capital into the business crowdfunding market.

rjmarvin writes: Vietnam is in the midst of a tech boom http://www.pcmag.com/article2/.... The country's education system is graduating thousands of well-educated software engineers and IT professionals each year, recruited by international tech companies like Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, LG, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others setting up shop in the southern tech hub of Ho Chi Minh City and the central coastal city of Da Nang. Young Vietnamese coders and entrepreneurs are also launching more and more startups, encouraged by government economic policies encouraging small businesses and a growing culture around innovation in the country.

rjmarvin writes: A GitHub project is using the 23andMe API for genetic decoding to act as a way to bar users from entering websites http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-bl... on the Internet. based on their genetic data--race and ancestry. "Stumbling around GitHub, I came across this bit of code: Genetic Access Control https://github.com/offapi/rbac.... Now, budding young racist coders can check out your 23andMe page before they allow you into their website! Seriously, this code uses the 23andMe API to pull genetic info, then runs access control on the user based on the results. Just why you decide not to let someone into your site is up to you, but it can be based on any aspect of the 23andMe API. This is literally the code to automate racism."

rjmarvin writes: Microsoft has announced http://sdtimes.com/microsoft-r... RTM of Visual Studio 2015, the latest version of its flagship IDE, along with the release of.NET 4.6. The release includes a new set of DevOps services featuring the Build vNext cross-platform build service, the IntelliTest automated unit testing tool, and a Dev/Test service delivered both via the cloud in Visual Studio Online and on-premises through Team Foundation Server. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft, highlighted three main themes Microsoft focused on with VS 2015 in an interview with SD Times: developer productivity, “a holistic set of DevOps services" and giving developers choices when it comes to tooling toward the goal of building Universal Windows Apps for Windows 10. VS 2015 and.NET 4.6 are available here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-....

rjmarvin writes: MasterCard has released an Open API Declaration http://sdtimes.com/mastercard-... filled with promises from MasterCard to developers using its APIs. Sebastien Taveau, chief developer evangelist at MasterCard, said that building APIs requires openness and dialogue with the developers who will be consuming it. The MasterCard Open API Declaration includes a quote from the company’s CEO, Ajay Banga, who wrote in the declaration that MasterCard is “bringing together developers and entrepreneurs using MasterCard APIs to create new applications to drive a new generation of commerce through our products, solutions and services.” The declaration https://developer.mastercard.c... contains promises such as “When a developer requests a technology feature or reports a problem, the Open API Team won’t just listen. We’ll act" and offers a road map for the MasterCard APIs and toolsets out to 2020.

rjmarvin writes: As the father of Java, James Gosling gets a lot of love from the millions of developers who use the language around the world. Today, however, he programs robots that swim in the ocean. SD Times caught up with him http://sdtimes.com/twenty-year... to discuss the early days of Java, the evolution of the JVM and how Java 1.0's legacy relates to the Internet of Things.

rjmarvin writes: The Node.js and io.js forks of the open-source JavaScript V8 runtime platform have announced official plans http://sdtimes.com/node-js-and... to merge development under the Node.js Foundation.The merger was put to a vote on GitHub by io.js developer Mikeal Rogers, who initially proposed the merger in February, and the io.js technical committee voted to approve the merger yesterday https://github.com/iojs/io.js/.... According to Rogers, the team will continue releasing io.js versions while the convergence takes place. The move comes shortly after Node.js project lead TJ Fontaine announced http://blog.nodejs.org/2015/05... he is stepping down from the project, which will now be openly governed by the foundation.

rjmarvin writes: As homes get “smarter” and fill up with more connected devices, one startup is betting on gesture control http://sdtimes.com/reemo-grant... as a natural way to manage a true Internet of Things. Reemo is a Minneapolis-based startup developing a wrist-worn watch and software platform for developers to integrate gesture controls into connected devices and applications. This month the company http://www.getreemo.com/ announced the alpha release of the Reemo Watch, currently in its fifth prototyping iteration, along with the Reemo API and SDK, which include interface libraries in JavaScript, Objective-C and Java.

rjmarvin writes: Apache Mesosphere users can now integrate http://sdtimes.com/googles-kub... Google's Project Kubernetes into their containerized cloud environments. Mesosphere today announced https://mesosphere.com/blog/20... that it would begin including Kubernetes as a standard feature of its Mesosphere Data Center Operating System. Google Cloud Compute project manager Craig McLuckie told SD Times the long-term goal is to bring Google’s internal cloud architecture and capabilities to the public as standard issue for all data centers, starting with making the system production-ready.

rjmarvin writes: Flush in market share, emerging platforms and devices, Android developers face a fragmented version, IDE and app tooling landscape http://sdtimes.com/androids-gr.... Android grew to 81.5% of the global smartphone market share in 2014, Spread within that massive growth is an operating system split into different forks on different smartphone and tablet device lines, made by different manufacturers all running different versions of Android itself, from Froyo to Lollipop. Despite more features, development options, platforms and emerging devices to target than ever before, actually developing for Android can be a pain in the app.